


Hic Est Aries

by Ryo Hoshi (Hoshi_Ryo)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Other, Timey-Wimey, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 12:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoshi_Ryo/pseuds/Ryo%20Hoshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They found a ship, but the oddest thing about it was inside.</p><p>(Or: In which Jade gets given a salvaged robot by Jake, and gets a bit of company.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CredibilityProblem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CredibilityProblem/gifts).



> This has elements of steampunk mixed in with cyberpunk and biopunk. I regret nothing.

Jade relaxed in the hammock-chair, feeling so much better now that her island was all hers again. It was alright when people visited—it'd been years since Jake had left with Becquerel, and she'd had the island all to herself for most of them. And really even when Jake and Bec had been there it was pretty much the same; she knew it'd been rough and they'd really had little practice _speaking_. It had taken them years to learn enough to do all the repairs a nous needed, and it was sheer luck that Bec had managed to stay functional enough to teach them it—as it was, she found talking to people just plain stressful: people wanted so many _words_ and it was hard and nobody understood.

Well, alright, her older brother had but he had left with Bec. Halley was a _nice_ nous, powerful enough to keep their island's systems running, but Halley was not really a very sophisticated nous. While he could manage a lot of the basic shit, like Fetch, he just wasn't a _friend_ in the same way Bec was.

Bec might show some signs of his canine roots, but he'd been a hell of a lot more sophisticated. She had a vague idea that Halley was really a lot closer to their line's canine roots, and that Bec was not entirely severed—especially from how her friends reacted when they talked on the etheric net. It was harder to keep the patterns she'd picked up from Bec out of her speech. The island was _big_ , and Jake had spent a lot of his time busy checking out the arcology inside, and the caretaking tasks such as keeping the wildlife inside from overpopulating.

(It was not, really, that she wasn't able to do it herself—Jade had all the skills needed—but because they had agreed without needing to actually mention it aloud that he'd take on the burden himself. Jade _liked_ the animals, and just didn't like the idea of killing a bunch of them. Jake was a lot more comfortable with it, aside from when it was necessary to kill off some of the fairybulls.)

Jade had loved the tech, only occasionally venturing into the steppes inside their island, and then mostly to frolic with the friendlier wildlife with one of Bec's mobile units.

Halley wasn't as much fun, he couldn't get at the mobile units' more exciting features.

…Jade wondered as she dozed off if maybe, next time Jake stopped by, he'd be willing to stay for a bit, along with his pack. She was used to _his_ company, and they'd be used to her and Jake's quirks—and easier maybe to get herself used to company…

  


Jake leaned back a little, shifting to get a bit more comfortable in the accel couch. He was still getting used to some things—but Dirk and Roxy were off working on getting a nous of his own make ready for a full outfitting, and Jane had a bank of hysterai to take care of. It'd been a pretty exciting round of exploring for all of them, and he felt rather good about it.

Bec wuffed at him, and he grinned. "Don't worry, old boy—we're not going to toss you." But they could stand spending a while settled down, finally. The strange alien ship they'd salvaged was in good enough condition to actually fix up, instead of the usual strip-for-parts routine they put abandoned ships through. It promised to let them finally shift Bec back to the island, maybe even let Jade have a ship for her own use, and the downtime that they could afford meant other things for their little pack, too.

Of course, how much any of them was kin didn't really matter—benefits of being half from long pack tradition, and the rest modded clones from a slow-way colony ship's genebanks. And it wasn't hard to see why Dirk and Roxy had been happy to take their place in a pack—while English and Crocker were good respectable names out here, Strider and Lalonde had notorious progenitors, and those names weren't welcome in anywhere civilized.

Likely not anywhere _un_ civilized, too, if they had looked any _more_ like their originals…

…but he wasn't going to explain that to Jade unless she decided to form a pack with the younger Strider and Lalonde.

And hopefully she'd be too busy with the interesting nous they'd found and he'd claimed as a gift to her to be thinking about _that_.

  


Jade wasn't sure exactly how long she'd been dozing when Halley barked, alerting her to an incoming ship, already initiating docking procedures. She shifted, calling up on her lenses a readout, then grinned as she saw the seal on the request: the skull-and-trident of Jane's seal was unmistakable, and while they might be out in the wilds they weren't so far out of contact to not be able to get their seals registered. She'd watched as Jane and Jake got their pack's seal—the one that they'd hand down from mother to daughter, the symbol of a pack's matriarch—registered.

With a happy wff she slipped out of the hammock-chair, automatically saving the idle blueprints she'd been working on, and sprinted from transportalizer to transportalizer to the docks.

Jake was waiting for her in the lock, grinning—and he was still the easiest company she ever had, it was him and they happily chattered away at each other, excited babble and tails wagging before he finally told her: "Cub, we found a working ship!"

"Not a junker?"

He shook his head. "This one's salvageable. It's alien, but whomever they were, they were close enough." There was a slight ear-flick of nervousness; Jade appreciated things like that, and really she didn't understand why anybody'd _not_ splice in such useful features. Looking like an olden-time human was so overrated…

"What's wrong?"

"…I called dibs on the nous for you—Dirk would want it, but he's going to be busy with the rest of the ship…"

Jade frowned slightly. "Is it a weird one?"

"Yes, cub."

  


Jade understood what had been meant by weird when she saw it. It was clearly a nous, strangely, despite being in a cradle that was rather more clockwork than usual. That was not really as much of a surprise as the amount of bio-based tech elsewhere in the ship; Jade was used to it being the other way around.

It looked, almost, as if whomever this ship had belonged to had implanted control mechanisms into a space-going life form.

Significant parts of the clockworks were rusted and bent out of joint, and the design of the housing was alien. It was not more humanoid than most nooi were; most reflected the base species' form, or else were columns, and the use of humans… Well, she knew there once had been stories about possibly those whose bodies were not able to live elsewise being changed into nooi but with hysterai & gene sequencers, and the Great War, it simply was…not really needed. It was just too easy to prevent that happening while somebody was still young enough, and too taboo to do it on _purpose_ …

Though, the ram's horns on the nous's head, and slight other details—weirdly close to standard human, maybe modeled on the more exotic septs, which would be worse—suggested that maybe it was just alien convention. There was nothing preventing using a humanoid shell for a nous, except for…

Jade felt rather relieved that this one would look, once out of the obviously-alien cradle, like an antebellum model—she was rather certain that it wasn't too long postbellum that nooi with obviously metallic shells stopped being the norm. People would be understanding, wouldn't mistake this nous for a recent make; they might even think it was an old Iron Goddess model clank. They were far enough out that it was credible they'd get to salvage one or two, and there was nothing wrong with keeping going a nous based off a human if you came across them. Just as long as nobody noticed Dirk and Roxy, and mistook this nous for recent, human make…

  


Jake had helped Jade get the find into her workshop, and hooked up, before he went back to working on the alien ship. That was fine, really; while she was definitely comfortable with Jake around, she was used to going a while just knowing he was around. It didn't hurt that she was still not really used to the rest—Jane was really easy for her to be around, having raised by an intact pack herself, but the other two… Jade was rather certain that Jake was the first person they'd ever really met who'd been given non-human features.

This had not stopped Roxy from asking if this meant her children could be given _cat_ features. (That was an ice-breaker, the first proof that you'd had that the pair on the lifeboat had really fled their old home for good, safe reasons; it'd taken days for Dirk to finally work up the courage to touch Jake's tail, and that'd been unfortunate because he'd pulled. The distress call—Roxy had set it to activate after a bit, not so soon as to get them grabbed by their old ship—had been what drew Jane to make her first visit, too.)

Jade suspected they'd probably been perfectly _happy_ to see this nous off of their salvaged alien ship. It couldn't be comfortable for _them_ either. At least she'd grown up around saner folk, even if Bec had mostly had to use old vids to teach them about how humans were supposed to behave.

The compulsive check of the airlock doors—a habit ingrained by the safety vid Bec had made from security cam footage after the Accident—went right before she settled down to crack the nous's skull open, see if the bio component was stuffed into there.

…It looked more like the delicate mechanisms Dirk built—hardened electronics, though some of that had the delicate scent of having fried, more intact clockwork—than what she'd expect inside a nous's main body's head. She tilted the table back, to check the chest—more hardened electronics and _no sign_ whatsoever of bio tissue. She probed gently, wondering briefly if she ought to ask Dirk's aid but she knew enough of his work and knew all too much why he was so careful with Lil' Hal. Besides, this didn't look too alien.

It just looked like somebody tried running the FTL drives with her 'lectronics not locked down. The clockwork was pretty fine, and it was really pretty trivial to start it working again once she'd pried out the worst-fried of…hm. Looked to be drives…

Jade asked Halley to start playing her tinkering playlist and settled down. The look on her face, the position of her white ears and the happy wave of her tail, would be scary to anybody who wasn't absolutely familiar with her.


	2. Aradiabot

Aradia Megido came to awareness suddenly, with a definite sense that she'd been _awake_ for some time before.

A strange pink hornless being, with unusual eyes, was reaching inside her chest and smiling at her. "Ah, there we go! Feeling better?"

"…what?"

She—Aradia wasn't sure how she knew that this alien was a she—smiled. Apparently that was the correct answer. Somehow.

She didn't track what the strange thing said next. It was technical, and Aradia knew that wasn't her skill. That was…

…indigo arrow, broken sunglasses broken horn _really_ hapless sweat-soaked romantic advances she'd hated and missed; gold two-pillars, doubled small horns, snaggle-toothed lisp, unique eyes and a sad, resigned smile and…and _screams_ …

…She wasn't sure who. And Aradia found herself listening to her own voice give the young woman—Jade? how did she know that?—further directions for repairing her. Whomever they'd been, they'd expected this.

  


Aradia followed Jade around as soon as her legs were working, again. She was not sure why, there was just…something that told her: This is what you need to do. It was strange, knowing that somebody had put a script into her, but at the same time reassuring. She might not know exactly what happened, and there was so little she remembered that she could get at directly—she'd already proven able to read the script on the ship's side, _Aspirant,_ and even translate it.

She'd not really been able to explain to anybody's satisfaction why that name.

There was something rather satisfying about the regular rhythms of Jade's day, so far. The _Aspirant_ was enough different from the ships they were used to that it was not an easy task to refit it for their own use—and a pack of Traders could expect a random selection of anything humanity knew it'd tossed into space, and then some, all with the off chance of having to do _something_ with the random shit.

Aradia didn't know how she knew _that_ either.

The island—why, exactly, Jade called it that when it was an artificial moon, was a mystery to Aradia—was mostly empty of the living. There were ghosts, most too faded and old to actually do more than provide Aradia with a living 'image' of what the station had been like in its heyday. It was, she pieced together, a research station and trading post; cautious questioning of Jade helped flesh out the picture.

It did not really make it anything that made sense, though. Aradia had no idea how a war could be civil, nor what a 'revolution' was, and the vid that Jade showed her to try to explain did not make sense. It certainly looked nothing like civil, unless humans had a very strange idea of what it meant to be civil. The idea of a transit hub—a place intended to facilitate repairs on ships, and transfer of people and supplies—made a bit of sense, at least…just not why it had never been put to the use it'd been built for.

  


Aradia did not find much more sensible explanations from the ghosts. However, she did find a very nice hat.

  


There was a bit of confusion when Jade told her that it was nice that she didn't show any sign of finding her strange. Aradia had the vague feeling that this was normal, really. It was perhaps not necessarily _quite_ what she was used to—a feline in olive with horn-ears came to mind—but it just felt normal to expect somebody to have some of the characteristics of the animal that had raised them, and she _had_ seen Bec.

There had been a bit of a pause.

"…We usually raise our cubs ourselves," Jane said, ears turned a bit. She had forgotten how alien Aradia really was, how alien she might be if her memory ever was fully restored. There was a chance, really. She was not a normal nous, the lack of wetware proved that much, and if her builders had expected her to have had her drives fried then there might be mirrors somewhere. After all, the reason normal nooi were bioelectromechanical constructs was so their electronics could be shut down for to protect them from the electrical surges caused by active FTL drives, and while Jade really wasn't comfortable enough around Dirk and Roxy to spend much time with them she knew that so far the alien ship had a _lot_ in common with human ones.

Jake had told her that they'd not found the drives yet, though, but why else would Aradia's electronic components have been destroyed?

At least Aradia didn't ask for more details.

  


Of the older humans, Jake and Jane were the ones Jade was most comfortable around. Aradia did not quite understand why. The parts that made sense were that the other two had Ancestors who were apparently extremely infamous for their dislike of…Aradia wasn't quite certain.

She was rather certain it wasn't related to blood color or living on land or on water, but those were the only reasons she could really think of and she wasn't sure _why_ either.

The end result, though, was that she was getting quite familiar with Jake's expressive ears and almost-always-wagging tail (though his were all-black, unlike Jade's), and when around Jane noticing just how useful the furry ears and tails of the other two dark-haired humans were when trying to read their emotions.

Aradia was not quite certain what Jane was working on, though they had tried to explain. It did, it seem, tend to draw Jade to sit and watch her work, and since Aradia felt there was some important reason to stay near Jade she did.

It was hard having no idea what a Mother Grub was nor why you were finding strange the idea of a person doing its job. It was hard, and Aradia was rather certain nobody could ever understand.

  


Aradia felt strangely unsurprised when, around a perigee since she woke (four days, thirteen minutes short, exactly), Jake rushed into the room excitedly carrying a skull.

The skull was, in and of itself, not actually a thing she would consider it strange to find unsurprising, when it came to Jake. She had already seen his room here, and its shelves of carefully-labeled skulls. It'd really be rather more surprising if he were not excited about the skull.

What _should_ have been surprising was the fact that it had a pair of short, sharp horns. She knew, deep down, that if the skull had not already been defleshed (and she had a vague theoretical awareness of about how long it would take on a ship for that to happen) the layers of tissue would have been thick enough to nearly entirely hide that the horns were bifurcated instead of growing from a single hornbed, though she knew too the way it would have felt to run fingers through the hair and the slight pressure it'd take to feel that it was only a thin strip of flesh hiding that. Her fingers weren't that sensitive, so it likely was an illusion.

She did not feel sad, just that it was somehow inevitable and a thing she had expected without any awareness she had been waiting for it.

She knew before Jake had said anything that they'd found the helmblock—there was a part of her that had expected this, somehow, just as she knew the lack of bodies until now had not had anything to do with 'lifeboats' whatever those might be.

That Jade had made a point of showing her were to find them did not change the utter alien quality of the idea.

  


Later, Jade took her to the spot her hatchmate had found the skeleton. (It was strange that humans used gendered terms for those wigglers who had come from the same Mother Grub in the same round, though Aradia had a sense that she had once known terms like it that were antique, instead of alien.)

The ghost smiled, and lisped a greeting.

_"Ii've been waiitiing."_

He guided her to what she recognized as a shielded safe, what part of her told her was of course a thing he would have done.

She even knew the means by which to open it.

Inside there were drives like the ones Jade had carefully pulled out of her, but intact, each one carefully labeled with tags, yellow handwriting on them indicating exactly where each one was to go, and she knew of course he would have done this for her.

  


It was another perigee before Jade had the last one installed, work going slowly because it was just them on the island for now, and Aradia knew that _now_ it was time to activate the replacement hardware. It was the same sense of temporal inevitability that had guided her earlier, that had told her such things as to hide that she suspected it had not been a malfunction in the safety mechanisms that had caused her electronics to fry but the simple fact that she had needed to have it on for some reason.

It was the same thing that had kept her from saying that the skeleton they had found in the helmblock (that she _knew_ it was the helmblock) was the real FTL drive on the ship, and the broken electromechanical drive they had looked and deemed best replaced was an entirely different sort of drive.

They were already used enough to her memory holes (there were so many of them) that she knew they would have accepted even a fragmentary answer without a thought that she might know more than that. That it was the truth was beside the point as well.

But it would be awkward to explain why she felt so certain that her memory would be restored. If nothing else, most of them were skeptical about ghosts—she suspected that there was something about having tails and furry ears that marked certain humans as likely to be psychic, just like she knew somehow that the warmer colors of blood meant the same for her own kind. (She supposed that the blue hydraulic fluid had a point, possibly it had been expected to make it easier to spot leaks?)

With a brief warning to Jade, she started the reboot that would integrate the backup drives in properly.

  


_The familiar uneven fangs were even more apparent when he frowned. "Are you 2ure we need two do thii2, AA?"_

_She nodded. "This is not how it's supposed to end. Don't you want to…?"_

_"…ye2." He hesitated on a little before asking what they both knew was the important question. "Do you tru2t tho2e too?"_

_"With my life."_

_He laughed._

_They both knew that it was going to kill both of them._

Aradia opened her eyes again.

So.

It had worked.

She looked over to Jade, whose ears signaled her nervousness even though her face wasn't.

She smiled, feeling it more than she had before. "Don't worry. I'm staying."

The excited hug was not so bad.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Aspirant_ is Latin, and translates to (in this case) "We aspire." The title, _Hic Est Aries_ could be translated as "Here Be (A) Ram" if we were to use the traditional rendering for " _Hic sunt [Noun]_ " as the base. Nous is a Greek term, nooi is its plural; use nous if you want to look it up.
> 
> If you think you spot a reference you probably are right, I'm not going to actually try to make them easy to spot or recognize, and some are filtered through a few layers of abstraction. And I actually could put together pretty quickly a timeline, as well as answer such questions as where John, Dave, and Rose are…
> 
> As for where Jade lives: It's a part of space that was explored a few generations back & deemed Boring. Its main feature is places that you can colonize, which is most economically done via slow-way ships if there's not any very valuable natural resources on the planet. There's a few scientific and military outposts, but most FTL travel is through small and independent operators and the government has a very loose grip. (Most things it will simply not be willing to consider worth doing anything about.)


End file.
